Tools for passing knowledge from an author or originator to a reader are well-known in the realm of electronic literature, and are commonly used to document complex software packages. All such systems have shortcomings. The following discussion outlines both the range of the conventional systems and the shortcomings of each type.
Software and General Documentation
One examplary documentation system is that used in the open-source Python language system. This system operates as a set of interlinked hypertext documents, carefully organized to provide the user of the Python language with rapid and relevant access to information on the uses and characteristics of the language. Another example of such documentation tools is the Wikipedia Web site, a collaborative open-source encyclopedia accessible to all on the World Wide Web. Its pages are intensively interlinked, and interconnected with many other Web locations.
The Wikipedia Web site, and in fact any open-source document system, suffers from the disadvantage of potential unreliability of its content and structure. Any method of reviewing, vetting, and correcting a system of documents relies on a controlling administrative process. The absence, in any formal sense, of such a process for an open-source document system reduces its acceptability as a source of reliable and accurate information.
Many proprietary documentation systems, for example the “Help” pages for a software application, work similarly while eliminating the issues of reliability and accuracy. A key disadvantage to the proprietary documentation systems is their frequent shortfall of coverage and lack of responsiveness in areas needing special attention for users. The open-source documentation systems adapt to such shortfalls quickly, though they usually require cycles of correction.
All such open-source and proprietary documentation systems, as carefully-structured as they are, give readers considerable freedom in choosing paths to take through the content. Such freedom is at once an asset and a liability. If a document system such as Wikipedia or Python's system is used, the reader is offered no appropriate serialization of presentation that would support the orderly acquisition of knowledge. Sequencing of presentation is a necessary component of education and knowledge transfer.
A proprietary publishing system such as that of Microsoft Reader sequences its presentations quite well using a table of contents for a work, along with a set of conventional links forward and backward through a work, but it lacks richness in its use of links. In other products such as Adobe Acrobat, links within a work and among works are easily placed, but there is no systematization of the determination and placement of those links. In nearly every product, a single narrative line is assumed to be the primary means of presentation and assimilation of a work's content.
Conventional Document Authoring Tools
Document authoring tools abound. XML Editors include: syntactical editors such as Stylus Studio, EditML Pro, xmlBlueprint, Xeena, Xerlin, and Cooktop; visual editors such as XMetal, EditiX, Morphon, FrameMaker, and Vex; and text editors such as emacs, VIM, and JEdit. All of these address the detailed structure and appearance of a document but ignore its semantics and the structure of its meaning. Mind mapping tools such as MindManager, PersonalBrain, Inspiration, Visual Mind, ThinkGraph, or FreeMind address the semantics and structure of meaning, but do not offer flowing, readable text in a continuous narrative form. None of these tools address an instructional mode of presentation in a manner straightforward enough for most authors to use.
One exemplary prior art document authoring tool is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,684,369, entitled “Web site creator using templates”, and issued to Bernardo et al. (“Bernardo”). Bernardo provides software tools for simplifying the creation of Web sites, including pre-stored templates containing formatting information, menus and views to guide the user, components to facilitate collaboration among Web site creators, graphical design components, review components, and other elements. Bernardo does not, however, address the dynamic organizing of the content for instructional or other pedagogical purposes suited to different readers, nor does it address the restriction of content so as to maintain the reader's immersion in and focus on the content to the exclusion of external material. Bernardo also does not distinguish between the terms “knowledge base” and “database”.
Immersive Reading
Conventional electronic literature makes extensive use of hyperlinks as a means of letting a reader link from one text to another. The reader's freedom in exercising links in the product of a document authoring system offers a constant temptation to stray outside the document to links elsewhere, or to allow the document's visual distractions, including the visible markings indicating its hyperlinks, to interfere with reading. Learning is most effective when it is immersive: the learner, or in this case the reader, gains information best when outside distractions are not allowed to interrupt the engagement with the material being learned. A student of language can attest to this fact. In immersive reading, the reader is so deeply engaged with the contents of the document that the reading experience embraces the widest and deepest ranges of the reader's awareness. Conventional electronic literature makes little or no attempt to establish and maintain the immersive “spell” for the reader. Consequently, the distractions offered by both the World Wide Web and the links within the document itself serve to disrupt the reader's learning process.
Programmed Instruction
An opposite problem also confronts the designer of an electronic learning tool: the overly-restrictive application of rules to the reader's progress through the presented material. This problem first arose with the advent of “programmed instruction”, or PI, in which a reader was required to enter a specific answer to a question and then follow a specific series of steps based on that choice. A pioneering example of this technology was the Plato Project in the 1960s.
The authors of such documents found them difficult to program. Making mistakes was easy, and the trivial nature of the lessons being conveyed made the work much like counting grains of sand. Likewise, readers often found such documents trivial and boring, and lost interest in them quickly. Later efforts met with more success, but the conventional approach to specificity and rigidity of requirements have generally made such tools of less interest to authors and readers. They would be of greater interest if their methods were integrated into a more-relaxed framework.
Offering Choices to Readers
The realm of knowledge transfer would be well served by the availability of tools which offer the author a means for ordering one or more sequencings of written material for presentation, and offer the reader a means for following any specific sequence provided by the author. Furthermore, such tools should provide the author with the means to present to readers any supporting material without breaking the immersive state of a reader's mind during the reading.
Different readers, equipped with different cognitive processes and styles of thought, tend to follow different threads of discourse through a body of knowledge. For example, some readers cannot immerse themselves in the conventional temporally sequenced presentation, but are quite comfortable with a traversal of the material through associated themes and ideas, as is done in the works of James Burke. Allowing readers to choose from a wide variety of approaches to threading the body of knowledge in some order would provide a wider range of readers with improved engagement with the knowledge to be assimilated.
Holding the Reader's Attention
Knowledge transfer works better when the means of conveyance acts as a “containment vessel” for the required knowledge, keeping the reader within its bounds to the greatest extent possible. Furthermore, knowledge transfer is enhanced when the author's background material, originating in glosses, references, sidebars, footnotes, and other sources, is integrated smoothly with the sequenced material. This makes the document as a whole capable of “bootstrapping” the reader into a rapid understanding of what might otherwise be an arcane field replete with jargons, notations, and conventions that make ordinary reading a monumentally difficult exercise.
When an author, whether an educator or a writer of fiction or nonfiction, can supply some kind of rule structure to guide readers without frustrating or boring them, the reader's immersion in the material is enhanced and not damaged. Such reader immersion serves the knowledge transfer process in the best possible way.
Moreover, maintaining a reader's attention to a handheld device having a display screen of limited size requires a method and apparatus for easy-to-use reader navigation among multiple windows containing such knowledge as identified above.
Strategy Games
Another realm of knowledge transfer well-known in the art is that of the electronic strategy game. Examples abound: Sid Meier's “Civilization” series of games, the “Galactic Civilizations” set, Microsoft's “Age of Empires” series, and many more. Such games confront a knowledge-intensive problem: teaching new players how to play them. Failure at this task yields poor sales of the games. To profit their makers, the games organize and present their rules, entities, relationships, and dynamics in the best ways they can.
Such organization and presentation methodology are appropriate candidates for use in a more-general knowledge transfer setting. The dearth of such applications in formal education is surprising—to bring about a student's rapid and successful absorption of knowledge would seem to be desirable. A major obstacle seems to be the ease with which an educator can adopt the principles and practices of the game authors. Easing the educator's tasks in preparing new works such as electronic textbooks would open the way to significant improvements in the use of electronic materials, including instructional materials developed using game-learning principles, in formal education.
The Demonstrated Need
In summary, a strong need exists for educational tools and methods which: 1) assure validity and relevance of the material presented, 2) maintain the reader's immersion in the material, 3) focus and guide the reader through orderly sequencings of the material, 4) stimulate the reader with presentations of sufficient scope and interest, 5) support the reader's rapid acquisition of knowledge details, 6) offer the reader more than one choice of sequences of presentation of the material, and 7) facilitate and simplify the work of authors and editors in their efforts to accomplish 1) through 6).